For the past few weeks, my 10-year-old daughter has had a little ritual. Once she gets home from school, she grabs her library book and disappears into the backyard. She turns on the backyard Sun Home Luminar sauna, sets the temperature to 120 degrees, and sits in the room reading, fully clothed. I once went outside to find five neighborhood kids sitting there, chatting and warming up.
I live in Portland, Oregon, which has a healthy sauna culture—probably because in an area that’s so gray and rainy, saunas have become an important tool to fight seasonal depression. Not only do I have a standing account at a local wellness center, I also joined a gym near my house to sit in the sauna. When I was offered the opportunity to test a widely available at-home sauna, I jumped at the chance.
McDreamy, Not McSteamy
There are a few things you need to keep in mind if you’re looking at this particular sauna from Sun Home. The first is that this is an infrared sauna, not a traditional sauna with löyly—that is, the steam that comes when you pour water on the heating elements.
Photograph: Adrienne So
There are devotees of both traditional and infrared saunas, and they can argue back and forth basically forever (and do). Traditional saunas are more likely to catch on fire. Infrared saunas are drier and thus more sanitary and easier to maintain. The health benefits of traditional saunas have been far more widely studied, and so on. For my purposes, the two main differences are that traditional saunas tend to be more expensive (indeed, Sun Home offers one for a cool $15,000), and in an IR sauna, you need to be dry when you sit in it so you don’t electrocute yourself on the heating panels.
I also strongly suggest pinpointing the ideal location and reading the assembly manual before buying. It will need to be in a dry, protected area, or it will take longer to heat up and possibly damage the electrical elements. I thought I lived in the ideal place to have an outdoor sauna, since I live on a double lot with an unused basketball court that’s both near to a dedicated outlet and close enough to my router to get a full Wi-Fi signal. Unfortunately, it’s not a covered basketball court. Sun Home assured me this wasn’t a problem.
Photograph: Adrienne So
The assembly process is also a bit of a bear unless you hire professionals. As the assembly manual notes, you will need multiple people at home when the sauna arrives, and the box must be kept dry. In Portland it rains pretty much constantly during peak sauna season. While everyone’s experience with a third-party assembly service will vary, mine in no way met Sun Home’s description of “white glove service.” For example, the third-party installer asked my dad to move all the pieces into the garage for him, after I told my dad that all he had to do was meet the guy at the door. (Sorry, Dad!)
Instead of waiting on that assembly service, my husband decided to do it himself. Sun Home says to budget three to four hours to assemble; it took us a weekend, not counting the time that it took to rewire the dedicated outlet. Happily, we are still married. The process was about as simple as clipping together Ikea furniture, which is good, because the manual was useless. (I gave all this feedback to the company and it has been responsive; Sun Home has since revised the manual and added a video.)
Smaller Than Advertised
Photograph: Adrienne So
Saunas are surprisingly social. When the Sun Home box arrived in my driveway, multiple people texted, “Do you have a sauna?” I extended an invitation to them all. I have since rescinded it. The five-person model fits five only if they are extremely small people. It fits my husband (5’11”) and me (5’2″) comfortably. We could possibly squeeze in one more if they were a very good friend, and slender.
In my testing on damp and chilly Pacific Northwest winter nights, the sauna limped toward 140 degrees Fahrenheit, with those last few degrees taking much longer than I expected. I usually wait about an hour, which gets it to around 150 degrees. Sun Home does warn that it takes longer to heat up if it’s colder than 40 degrees outside, unless you use “a weather cover.”
Photograph: Adrienne So
After I shared my experience with the slow heat-up times, the company sent out a technician to verify that it was not an installation error. He was able to get the sauna to the full 170 degrees Fahrenheit in just over an hour on a sunny day, with no weather cover and the company’s owner waiting patiently on the phone. The technician also offered his opinion, which is that the door doesn’t have enough weather-stripping, which is something I didn’t notice at night. You can see daylight all the way around the glass, which means heat isn’t sealed in. “I don’t want to knock the entire market, but in my experience of working with saunas of this type, a one- to two-hour heating process for this sauna sounds about right,” he said.
Also, Sun Home’s timer goes for an hour by default. It’s annoying to wait, have it only get up to 150, then it automatically turns off, the heat drops to 130, you have to reset the timer, and so on.
Photograph: Adrienne So
The sauna’s design has some other issues.
If you’ve opted to mount accessories on the wall underneath the control panel, there’s no place to lean your back, as the heated panels are directly behind the seats. This is inconvenient. The heating panels glow and are very pretty, but I do tend to burn my back if I lean on them for more than a few minutes. That’s inconvenient, as most people get naked to sweat in the sauna.
I asked Sun Home about the questionable positioning of the heating elements, and the company responded that they’ve never gotten this feedback before. When I received the sauna, the company provided me with a giant black sweating robe, complete with branded sweating hat, to wear inside and protect me from the heating elements. Wearing a giant black bag inside a sauna is profoundly strange but also delightful in its strangeness, and I am sure to wear my sauna hat every time I go inside.
Sun Home notes that you can buy aftermarket backrests to put more space between your back and the heating panels—the company sent them to me so that I would have them within a couple of days. A towel or wearing my sauna bag is cheaper and worked better.
Photograph: Adrienne So
Finally, the lock on the door engages from the outside. This is terrifying, because it’s way too easy to trap someone inside. When kids are around, I’m constantly checking to make sure one of them hasn’t locked another in as a joke. When I’m in there by myself, I peep outside every so often to make sure no serial killers are nearby. (The lock is there, Sun Home says, because without it there is a risk of the door coming ajar and blowing back in a stiff breeze, shattering the glass.)
On the plus side, the finishes are very nice. It looks and feels sturdy. The faint scent of cedar in the air when you step inside is lovely. As my daughter and the neighborhood kids can attest, it is a beautiful, cozy little nook in which to curl up and read a book if you’re the little kid of a perpetually cold person, and are also a perpetually cold person.
For me, it’s way more convenient to open the Sun Home app, let the sauna warm up for 30 minutes, and step into the backyard than it is to walk three blocks to my gym, where I have to justify going into the sauna by working out beforehand.
Screenshots courtesy of Adrienne So
You can connect your phone either via Bluetooth or USB and listen to music or a podcast with Sun Home’s ceiling-mounted speakers, which have a decent depth of sound, even if you do really hear the plosives when you’re listening to podcasts. You can turn on party lights with the touch of a button on the control panel, for your party of two.
There is also a chromotherapy panel in the ceiling, which turns the sauna a kind of purplish pink. There are some small-scale studies that support the idea that chromotherapy reduces anxiety. I turned it on multiple times but found that sitting under a pink light panel somehow did not make me forget that I might get Freddy Krueger-ed in my own backyard. You can also opt for an additional infrared therapy panel on the door.
At this price, you want the sauna experience to be seamless and wholly satisfying. You don’t want to deal with assembly or delivery issues. You don’t want to wait an hour or more to get to full heat, and once you’re in, you don’t want to perch on the bench, gingerly touching your back to make sure it’s not burned. You don’t want to worry about glass shattering or a neighborhood 5-year-old getting locked inside.
There are a lot of other saunas where you can sit back without a qualm and don’t have to worry about the door shattering. For example, this one from Plunge is also Bluetooth-connected, you can lean back against the seats comfortably, and it has a wooden door! For $4,000, you can get a traditional home sauna from Costco. There is one person, however, in my household who does regularly hold sauna parties, and I do think my 10-year-old likes the Sun Home much better than I do. A sweaty, steamy room full of naked parents is a much less appealing reading nook.
